MOUSE software package: challenges and experience of fitting uncertainty management into long-term safety assessment puzzle

Abstract

Deep geological repositories for high-level radioactive waste require comprehensive long-term safety assessments involving numerical simulations of safety-relevant processes. Managing uncertainty across all parts of such a simulation framework is challenging, as general-purpose uncertainty management toolboxes typically lack either the variety of methods or the integration capabilities to simultaneously accommodate all components of the longterm safety assessment framework. Under these circumstances, developing bespoke uncertainty-management software based on up-to-date methods and well-maintained libraries but tailored specifically for the task at hand becomes more efficient than creating various plugins and converters for general-purpose tools. This paper discusses the experience of developing the MOUSE software package to illustrate this path from a modelindependent software to the uncertainty-management instrument tailored for the purposes of the numerical safety assessment framework.